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Hair Texture From Almost Anything Tutorial
by DreamMint  June 2010

This tutorial is for creating a grayscale hair texture that you can color in a variety of ways later.

When looking at most tutorials for making hair textures for IMVU and other 3D programs I noticed that usually the main thing they had in common was the use of Noise and Motion Blur.

One day I applied noise and motion blur to a picture of a popular soda drink and thought that it made a pretty decent looking hair texture. I changed the colors, added highlights, added the texture to a couple hair meshes on IMVU and submitted them to the catalog.

One of the nice things about this method is that there often ends up being a greater range of tones in the hair texture and the lines aren't so defined. One of the drawbacks though is sometimes you use a picture you have and try to turn it into a hair texture and it just doesn't look good. But more often then not it will.
Hair Texture Step 1Step 1.

Choose a picture. In this case I chose a picture of some rocks from the backyard where I lived.
I cropped it to an area 256x256 pixels in size, which is a common size for IMVU hair textures. You could make it 128x128 as well.
Hair Texture Step 2Step 2.

Add noise.
Hair Texture Step 3Step 3.

Apply motion blur.
Hair Texture Step 4Step 4.

Now the ends probably won't look good, just as they don't look good here. To take care of this I am going to use the scale tool from the toolbox to scale the height. In this case I made the height 368 pixels. But you can make it whatever you want.
Hair Texture Step 5Step 5.

I then use the crop tool to crop the layer to size. Or you can choose Layer, then Layer to Image Size.
Hair Texture Step 6Step 6.

If you really wanted you could use this as your hair texture. But for our purposes we will next choose Colors and then Desaturate. You can choose shades of gray based on Lightness, Luminosity and Average.


You now have a grayscale hair texture base that you can add color and highlights to.

Note: The more dark your grayscale hair texture base is the more dark your haircolor will be. Darker parts of the hair texture will create darker sections of hair and lighter parts will create lighter sections.

To learn how to color your grayscale hair texture base check out the next tutorial here.